I want to like this so bad, but the free tier changes still haunt me. I ran a little hobby project for a while on it that helped junior developers find jobs. The work needed to switch from PlanetScale ultimately meant I just canned the project.
Fairly or not, when I see PlanetScale, that’s what I think of.
Seeing the CEO on here defending it as if they nailed the execution of it doesn’t help either.
Though, I wonder with any cloud provider of databases: why?
You’re basically giving your data to a 3rd-party to have access to and to be reliant on.
You have a backup of your source, but I bet many don’t have local non-cloud backups of their databases, maybe because it’s too much data to do easily, and everyone assumes the provider’s backups will suffice. This is a main reason I think that more recognized cloud brands like AWS and Azure are used.
Why are you pretending like Planetscale is the only database provider? There are a large number of db/web providers (even free ones like GCP, Neon, Supabase etc) between using Planetscale and hosting your own server.
Remember when they shafted the free plan, laid off some good people and redesigned their website to look like some garish notepad? Pepperidge Farm remembers...
Um well, they shouldn't have done that. "If it means they go broke and need to shut down for me to keep having my free tier DB for 3 tables and 2 users, so be it, go broke"
I remember. It was a very painful moment for everyone involved. I still miss the people who aren't here anymore. I am not happy that it happened but I am also I am very glad to be at a profitable company. I get to work at a company that is growing sustainably surrounded by people I admire. I love our customers and I think in the long run people will root for a company that isn't just lighting money on fire at the alter of fake growth.
Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
> Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
it does feel to me that one way to demonstrate that is to not get pissy on hackernews. i know you’re in founder mode or whatever but this comment is the thing i’m now going to remember you for
Yeah, $5 databases is something that maybe I would actually use for some hobby projects, but that one sentence just killed any interest that I had in ever giving this company my money.
Same! Unreal that he keeps digging the whole deeper and deeper. Apparently, he doesn't know how to either keep his mouth shut or humble himself to admit a mistake and ask for forgiveness to those they burned by saying 'free forever'.
You stated you don't care what I think. Just wanted to say though that i've admired you and your company for a long time. I participated in user interviews so I could score one of your famous hats. I submitted copious feedback. I was an evangelist for branching workflows and recommended several colleagues to your product. I watched all the talks, interviews and devrel videos.
I'm glad you are doing better now as a company, but as naive as it may be, I guess I would love to see an example of a company that consistently put people over profits, that is all
If a business does not run at a profit, it folds, and all the people there lose out.
Now, of course, the scale of the profit is worth discussing. The use of the profit is worth discussing. But in general terms some profit is necessary.
For example, I bootstraped a business from 0 to 50 people. We took no outside investment. We "paid" for the growth using profits. Our working capital, cash reserves, stock, equipment, vehicles etc, all come out of profits.
Yes, over the years, there have been things that didn't work out. People who ended up surplus to requirements. People not suited to the role they were in. Most left amicably. Some were pushed. None of that was easy but it was necessary because just keeping unproductive (or worse, divisive) people around is bad for everyone.
Running a business is hard. Firing people is hard. Comments like "people over profits" are flippant, but miss the underlying realities small businesses face all the time.
Yes, there are large tech businesses out there with bottomless pockets, who hire (and fire) by the thousands. But surely those bring hired in cohorts that big understand that a wind blows both ways.
It's not necessarily helpful though to apply your feelings about that to all the businesses that are not that.
I have immense respect for you building a profitable bootstrapped business. We raised venture to do this, I can't imagine bootstrapping. People are upset that I said I don't care what he thinks and maybe I was harsh but honestly people who have never tried doing this are always the ones to take shots, you basically can't care.
> I was harsh but honestly people who have never tried doing this are always the ones to take shots
People who haven't tried doing what, running a VC-backed SaaS, a model which by its own nature is destined to end up engaging in dumping practices to gain market share, after which enshittification ensues? With the alternative being going bust or being acquired and then quickly shut down? As we've seen hundreds of times now?
I mean, yeah. In the sense that people who haven't tried kicking their cat tend to be the ones taking shots at those who have.
Look, maybe you're a unicorn, in the sense that you're the 1%, the single person in your batch who ends up both profitable and won't follow down this path. But that's an extraordinary claim that would require overwhelming evidence. You spent lots of resources on Youtube and Twitter evangelism to cheap solo devs, targeting the exact content those consume - even compared to all of your competitors and other dev tools going at this market, investing in this strategy harder than almost anyone - which obviously results in an enormously lopsided % of free-tier uses (that's the whole point of the strategy). To then go "turns out we're not profitable this way, who woulda thought, guess we have to go paid-only!", this alone basically rules out the extraordinary claim. There's no chance you didn't do the back-of-the-envelope calculation about how big of a free tier you could realistically support.
I am wondering about one thing though. I would also wish to do things bootstrapped if possible if I ever do anything but I just have some questions that might sound stupid but alright
How do you actually sell stuff on the internet with a price?
I will admit, free stuff are easy to sell... because they are free. But once you remove the free stuff, it becomes a scar easy to tell in the future, is the answer always having the paid stuff or somehow limiting who gets the free stuff.
Like as I wrote in another comment, I like fly.io's free model of some credits per month with credit card, I mean, I don't like them taking credit card but if that's what prevents them from spam, I would still consider it decent enough
But I have read some places where saying things like asking for a credit card would drive away most users, and even asking for mail for sign up sometimes really
As such the world has transitioned into something which runs via the ad model as people in some HN thread long ago basically summed it upto, it was evolution of sorts
Yet, I am on HackerNews, I care about privacy. I would feel the largest double-speak if my software got ads, at that point, I would just release it for free but that would make me no money, maybe even cost me some money, making it unsustaianable
I am not sure about the reality of things but I am a pretty frugal guy, so naturally its really hard for me to expect people to buy stuff, let alone the stuff I make/hack.
I could try to open source any stuff I build, but at that point, what is the matter of that aside from getting some stars/internet points, don't get me wrong I love the philosophy of open source yet I feel like its very hard for me to actually generate money out of it
I love building simple things I guess, My projects ideally would be a simple golang binary maybe with postgres but sqlite's cool too, and I don't want to make it too hard to install unintentionally to trap people to my cloud or whatever really
I am asking because I feel like I can't go from 0 to 0 (employing even myself) and I feel like playing the growth game could be good but sooner or later, I would find myself in the same position as planetscale in that sense and I don't want it really, and I personally feel like my work can survive without VC funding as well. SO I genuinely don't know how I will get money from projects
My projects are niche as well, most of them aren't for profitability but rather to learn. I personally feel like I might be a good guy to do a job and to do these things as random projects to increase my portfolio and if luck strikes then that could be good I suppose.
I don't even expect someone to donate to my github if I ever create a project. Low confidence maybe, I am not sure. I have seen so many cool github projects that have gotten stars but not donations. I would love to donate to them, but personally I am frugal, I don't want it as a shield but I am opening up that shield and wanting to donate to open source. In fact if I make money through such any projects, I will try to actually donate to open source in the process as well.
So my question to you is: How? You guys make it feel so simple having people pay , There was the 4 hour work week which sort of suggested-ish building plugins for things etc. and I did calculation for it to actually make me "free" and I don't know but having 1000 people buy even 5$ personally a month would feel huge. but I am not sure as my frugality makes me believe everyone is like me and so why would they give me 5$ when they could do what I did or use some open source software with just some differences really.
You're assuming everyone values things the way you do. People do want to pay for products that solve their problems. Pick a problem you know well and solve it for someone else who has that problem. Discover if it has enough value to them to charge an appropriate fee. If that fee covers your cost then you are in business. Now figure out what it is going to take to find the next person. Find them, solve their problem. Widen the net to a larger group and you are moving. You have to start though, you need time researching, interviewing customers, messing around.
You sell it. And users are happy to pay because they're getting time and value in return. I also sell a product - not something database related but it doesn't matter. The users get value out of our product. To get the same thing elsewhere it would either cost them much more, be a lot less flexibly available, or be of lower quality.
If you were a gardener would you also find it hard to make people pay for you going to their house and taking care of their garden? They're paying for it because they feel it's worth it.
Of course, it depends on what you're selling, but I'm assuming you're not asking about selling gambling products or crack cocaine. As for those, the answer is "be a psychopath".
People over profit in this case would have been cowardice, not courage. Some had to lose their job for others to keep theirs and for the product to continue serving their customers.
Would you respect a leader who refuses to make hard calls and sinks everyone aboard the ship as a result?
Also people buy databases to do serious stuff. They pay you money to trust you with their data. Being a serious company that makes the hard calls to protect your product is exactly what a serious customer needs.
FWIW I was part of these layoffs and I completely supported them. No glory in putting your head in the sand when people count on you to do the right thing.
> if you liked the company or product so much why would you take shots like that?
Key word here is "liked". Seems like OP liked the company when it had a free tier, and no longer does after it axed the tier. They don't owe your company anything, in the same way your company doesn't owe anything to the non-paying "customers" it stopped subsidising. No foul play by either party. I wouldn't take it too personally.
Jesus dude,just say it was a mistake to call it free forever. How can you be a founder or whatever, have a product and not expect people to judge the words your website had, or the words you say? You should know it comes with the territory.
Doesn't matter how hard you guys worked to be profitable, it's about building trust and relationship with your audience.
Last sentence completely undercuts the other sentiments you shared in your comment… probably best to cut stuff like that out in the future IMHO, even if it’s how you feel.
"Either way I don't care what you remember or think."
Imagine building a product for developers and then going on Hacker News telling people to fuck off.
Someone at my job mentioned using PlanetScale recently. I said "I'll check it out" and now I have: the CEO has terrible judgement and is a jerk. Permanent veto.
I appreciate you’re responding personally and directly to people instead of running it through a corporate PR machine. That being said I’d also consider your tone, I have no doubt the topic pushes on a sore wound but the “I don’t care what you think” is probably not the attitude you want potential customers to stumble upon in the future.
I am not a customer and not in the market to be a customer anytime soon, I have no horse in this race, just an observation.
> Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
If you took your time to write it, you do care or if you genuinely don't, then people would now take it as a challenge to make you care...
This is just not good light. not all attention is created equal. This will hurt your company and your image.
Please, try to apologize to them if possible
I thought about it as an exercise as to what I thought your should last comment should be, it took some time but here it is
Hey, its great that you remember, it means that you cared about planetscale and somehow we were forced between false growth and real harsh truth and we wanted to present the truth, sorry if it had impacted any of your services. I know maybe I can't do much about how you can feel now about me or the company but I genuinely hope no matter what solution you might use now, you succeed in it with great success .If you feel like it, maybe give us another try but hey no pressure and as always, have a nice day :)
This took some time personally, especially after the part I genuinely hope no matter what solution personally but it didn't take more than 5 minutes to draft the whole response really.
Being kind helps. Atleast that's my philosphy or I would like to present it as such, I feel as if we are more common than different and basic human kindness resonates with that.
I hope you become the company seeking people's satisfaction first and absolute profits later but maybe that's an ideal. Just be honest with a bit of kindness and humility as there would be grace in it.
Honestly, my suggestion is to create something similar to fly.io really, have a 5$ free credit system but which requires credit card when signing up. It should prevent you from spams and if need be, try to limit it and try to do some excessive bot clearing
Maybe if you feel like you can have 5000$ for free without much compensation, then have limited (maybe verified?) people join in it for free with just credit card
Have some good restrictions on free license really, and although I haven't used fly.io as even the credit card got way too much of a requirement for me personally but,I would still look into what/how they are doing/implementing it
Taking some VPN as cautions plus taking note of suspicious activities from IP etc. comes to my mind as well if you go through this route. I think that you can genuinely create a good way to move some people as well or keep a free service while restricting it heavily really
Personally I wouldn't be able to afford the 5$ thing as well for just starting it out, I mean I haven't paid for any subscription ever on internet.
I am not sure what you are going to do or how you are going to pan out and take my suggestions lightly if need be, but please improve the tones and genuinely apologize to them if possible.
I don't know much about founder mode as other commentors point it out. I just think that your comment was a little bit rude and there were ways to make it better really
I'm surprised so many replies here are about removing a free tier 2 years ago. Things cost money, what did you expect? Whenever I get free products that cost money I expect it's either temporary, or I'm being the product myself.
So as some of my own feelings/thoughts on this: I've also sat on the "receiving side" of a "free forever" campaign now 2 times in my career. The first time driven by the CEO and the second time driven by the marketing team (and supported by the CEO). In both cases, I knew the truth (sitting on the product management side) that there was no sustainable way to have a "free forever" campaign: that there was finite end in both cases on the 2-5 year horizon before we needed to change plans. I advocated against adding the "forever" verbiage knowing this. The first time, I didn't push strongly: it was my mistake.
The second time, I pushed strongly and made sure the entire executive team knew that we would be misleading our users. I pointed to the horizon and talked about the problems with "forever" language. I had to push very strongly back on the marketing team to change verbiage and then they silently made updates anyway to add "forever" verbiage. They were eventually fired for this.
But what I find concerning here isn't that the "free" tier went away (it almost always must) but that there's denial and push-back in this set of threads about the verbiage. You made a mistake. Own it and apologize for the verbiage you put out there. Don't deny that it was ever there or argue over pedantic details about where/how that verbiage was placed.
as much as I question why someone would trust a free "forever" offer, I have a lot more questions about a company that is denying what's in the public record.
To be fair the CEO is quite comfortable using the word 'forever'. It was used as the title of the announcement to withdraw the Hobby tier and also specifically used to justify it:
Wow. The guy is a jerk and a liar. The board at PlanetScale needs to get this guy off the internet. He's too much of an asshole to be seen in public.
I have no real horse in this race. I know how to manage my own databases, but I do have people asking me about PlanetScale and asking me to use it for certain projects, and I will absolutely never do so now.
This is the bloody pricing page. If I as the CEO of a SaaS startup don't even know what our pricing page says I should step down. That's our offer, that's the most important page we have. Come on now. Writing "free forever" isn't something some rogue marketing intern does, this is a core positioning decision and something you'd absolutely be part of, if not leading, as the founder.
What are you arguing about? People send you web archive links and you're still stubborn enough to say that it wasn't the case. Shame to even see you here, just shows what kind of company you are from the inside.
Indeed. I'm a user of Cloudflare free and Oracle(tm) Always Free(sic) services, but for hobby projects where I'm not under the illusion that they owe me anything.
I think the longevity of Gmail, Youtube etc being both (a) absolutely free and (b) personally critical to many people has rather warped expectations in this regard. Take the freebie, be grateful, but don't imagine that giving no money to a corporation is going to incur any obligation from them to you.
If somebody built a service to try out planetscale or the fact that planetscale was constantly hyped around / sponsored some big names atleast in the youtube scale, I am pretty sure that some people went there thinking about the free forever and everything...
I do think it was a little bad move because now you can't even test planetscale and the memories of its free stuff still might haunt some people
Were we supposed to just keep it up until we go out of business or something? Out of sheer duty. Like burn everything we built to the ground to keep the free tier going as long as possible? Endlessly indentured to provide a free service on the internet for people that will never pay us money so that the people that do pay us money can eventually have to move provider too because we are shutting down?
I didn't enjoy doing it. I felt bad but I don't regret it at all.
Fair take I guess, but my curiosity wants me to ask how big were the costs of the free tier that it was trying to make you shut down..
Do you feel as if people were abusing the free tier ? Was the only solution according to PlanetScale be to close the free tier entirely? How much were the people actually using the service (like out of 100 people who signed up, how many people were constantly utilizing it till its fullest) or ( maybe abusing it even)
If lets say that you could build your company once again or you could start planetscale from its beginnings, would you still take this decision before it was big, since I feel like as if the free tier was a key part in atleast giving PlanetScale some name/fame.
I can understand how you feel but I just feel like there were a lot of people who were advocates of your software, partially because of how people could test it out for free as well and those advocates were the one who were hurt the most. Personally, I wasn't involved but I would pretty bummed too if I advocate a service and it does something like this, although, I would still understand the situation.
Yes, that was the promise you made. You said 'besides our commercial offering we're going to support your personal projects you run out of passion, forever' and then you changed it to 'actually, we're going to delete your passion projects unless you pay us money'.
You should absolutely regret making that promise. As I understand it you're wrapping hardware at AWS and GCP, and likely have since the beginning, so you should absolutely have understood that this was a bad promise because it was dependent on recurring costs towards those suppliers that you did not have control over.
It is both strange, fascinating but also wired and scary to watch all of these unfold in real life. Not just on the internet.
In pre 2010 era, we all knew Unlimited Bandwidth, Unlimited Storage was marketing and no one believes it. There is some sort of limit, and as long as we dont get caught it is fine. Free "forever" offering, Unlimited were all best effort. And It isn't just tech, but also politics. I mean they all say it but most wouldn't believe it.
And then we have a whole new generation of people who dont have this as norm anymore. They do believe everything should be free and could be free. Utopia is just around the corner. The cost of anything is so abstracted and muddled they have no idea why anything is priced as such.
Sure, it sounds like a marketing mistake, and you're owning up to it not being sustainable.
But you're burning trust with people before they even have a relationship with your company if you pretend it never happened.
It's much better to say "Sorry non-customers, this wasn't sustainable. I hope this new approach will better serve us both in the hobby use case and still be sustainable!"
Its hard shutting down services and nobody wants to do it. I've been there as a CTO and co-founder, but you made the right decision. Glad to see the new $5 plan because, imo, Planetscale is the best database to build with for majority of applications.
Many of us grew up on stuff like SDF/Freeshell and IRC and ad-supported web hosts. "Free forever" actually meant "free forever" to us, until services that used the same language to make promises ripped us off and turned us more cynical.
So? Maybe don't offer a free tier if you can't sustain it? And many other providers (like Neon, Koyeb, Supabase etc) still offer a free tier. Personally I don't like this type of bait and switch. If you can't sustain something don't offer it in the first place. Same with open source projects going closed source for money after getting free work from open source programmers.
Haha people have sent it to me! I'm currently trying to make it on my own in the wide world though.
I never disagreed with the decision to lay people off to become profitable. That's part of the implicit agreement when you take employment in the US. You can quit whenever you want and they can fire you whenever they want! I knew that going in!
I agreed with it, but of course it stung. That's only natural!
Sam and I are all good though! To his immense credit he reached out to me directly a little while back to mend any hurt feelings, of which I had a few. We're friends. He even came on my podcast and we talked for over an hour like old buds.
I have a lot of feelings and sometimes they get hurt. Sam has a fiduciary responsibility to the company. Today PlanetScale is a going concern and I'm happy and doing great! All is well.
Wow I didn't know he got laid off. I remember watching his videos a few years ago and absolutely loved his way of teaching. He's the reason I found out about PlanetScale to begin with.
Looking at their youtube channel, Aaron's videos had a total of ~1.4m views over 24 videos (an average of ~58k per video). Their recent videos don't even get past 1k views...
I wonder why other providers don't use metal ssd sync replication technique that planetscale uses? Most of them just default to EBS.
My interest in it peaked when I heard about NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe/TCP) and SPDK from Xata[1] and apparently with that performance is as good as planetscale metal, but planetscale found their methodology flawed[2] and they Xata never responded.
@samlambert what exactly makes it hard? Isn't it as simple as setting synchronous_commit=remote_apply or does planetscale have a custom strategy or are there other operational issues?
Just asking since I find it both the planetscale's engineering and its impact on competitive landscape very interesting.
you have to make sure you will never terminate these nodes, that you have all the operations maturity to cycle them responsibly, and resize them. I am sure they will get there one day but most people are still figuring out how to run databases on k8s so it's a long road.
Back then I was sure it was only a matter of time for other hosted database providers to move on from EBS.
But until Planetscale made a lot of noise about Metal no one seemed to bother.
I like PlanetScale, but they already have precedent very recently for having a free-tier and then cancelling it for a minimum of $40/month plan, which made many people switch. What's to stop them from doing the same here?
Be wary of building a cheap hobby project on it expecting pricing to stay consistent. If $40+ isn't feasible for you, you may be trying to switch off to a hosted PostgreSQL option, with all the pain MySQL->Postgres entails, soon.
(Planetscale employee)
This is very different though: it's not a free tier, it's an actual single node DB as a paid product. It's definitely not a good fit for every usecase, but if you have a hobby project it's a great way to start with plenty of room to scale if/when you get actual usage
Similarly to other replies (but my own opinion): it's not a huge source of revenue today, on a single customer basis, compared to our biggest customers, sure. But our goal is to provide potential customers that can't justify larger scale, 3-nodes databases, something they can build on and grow on our platform.
We would never want to pull the rug on paying customers: we want to enable them :-) sure it's not a huge part of our revenue, but that's not the goal. We just want to provide a great product, in a way that's affordable to everyone.
You of course don't have to take my word, but I think it makes business sense to do this and not pull the rug.
Compare to a free tier where you bleed money in the hopes that customers will end up paying you. Hope isn't a good business strategy right? :-)
In what way? Companies drop/move on from small customers all the time as positions and analysis changes. $5 a month might make sense now, but with thin profits, a lower than predicted "upgrade rate" and maybe a higher than anticipated support cost etc and this becomes a less profitable option without price increases, which loses customers causing more increases because of none scalable costs etc.
Throw in a change of leadership or business focus and it's an easy short term boost to drop the many smaller customers and focus on the big fish who make the real money.
It's a common pattern, echoed over many industries, and while you might not see it being likely here right now, if the concept literally doesn't make sense to you, you need to look up some basic business ideas because it's a pretty valid concern.
It's easier to pull the rug out from under a group of customers who earn you 5% of your revenue than it is to do the same thing to a group of customers who make you 25% of your revenue.
This small $5 plan is obviously not going to make Planetscale very much revenue.
You were buying flow for your sales funnel with a free plan now you want to attract users with a low tier plan. Your reputation was hurt with the first rug pull so why be surprised that users expect another rug pull from you in the future?
If a free plan attracts users that can be upsold is that free plan not profitable _vs_ paying for advertising?
If such upselling is done via rug pull tactics it damages your reputation vs never having a free plan in the first place.
If a new bank offered you free or discounted banking would you move over your accounts and payments and credit cards? What if that bank has a reputation for upselling via rug pulling?
For users the cost of switching can mean that services that are free or cheap are not worth it if they are expecting a rug pull.
I agree, removing the free plan was a bad move. They should have at least grandfathered existing free tier users. I was just explaining their point of view.
When you don't need advertising anymore, the free plan starts becoming a net loss. If the $5 plan is profitable today, it will probably stay profitable forever as their costs will only go down, never up. There is little incentive to remove it (until Broadcom or Oracle acquires them).
You did a good job explaining their view. What I am doing is explaining the view of users and judging by your last post I have not yet done a good job so let me try again:
If elimination of a service plan is expected to push enough users to a _more_ profitable service plan why would a business not do it? Does it matter if the plan to be eliminated, generates _some_ profit?
Why would we? we make a (small) profit on these cheaper tiers. We are a sustainable and profitable company. Also the free tier wasnt cancelled very recently it was 1.5 years ago so you are reaching a bit here.
Your $5 plan may be gross margin positive but incentives are to push users into higher margin plans and from this pov this new plan looks much like your previous free plan which was rug pulled. Offering a free service to buy users then imposing migration costs on these users when you rug pull damaged your reputation. Next time perhaps grandfather existing users instead. If you want this new plan to be taken seriously update your terms to promise you will not rug pull again.
He's responding in good faith to people expressing doubt that they will maintain this pricing tier, and is responding to rebuttals. Whether you agree with his point of view is different.
Case in point. Potential customers will see this dismissal as the equivalent of how long they expect this pricing to remain. You’re free to increase the price in a year and when customers are irked, “why isn’t it $5 anymore?” They’ll be met with “that’s not recent.” “That was so long ago”
If you want to rebuild reputation with hobby tier, you’ll probably want to put in a 3 year pricing guarantee, not 1 month like the notice last time.
free tiers are a subsidy paid by either VCs or paid users that in some cases can function as a marketing cost, if the free tier is time-limited and thus represents a finite cost to the business.
far better to just have transparent pricing that takes customer needs into account. bravo planetscale
Databricks Neon [1] has a free tier for their Postgres service. Neon's strength that allows them to offer a free tier lies in their serverless, cloud-native PostgreSQL architecture with a separation of storage and compute resources. This allows Neon to scale compute to zero automatically when the database is idle.
I’m not saying that can’t or doesn’t happen but I’ve been using them for about 2 years now and never experienced it. To be fair, my traffic patterns could just not overlap with their outages but wanted to add a data point.
After they ditched there free tier, it became basically untenable to justify trying Planetscale for $30 (USD as well) on a POC or MVP product, and it also felt like you were paying a lot for unneeded hardware.
This is actually a really interesting offering to have available as someone who needs DEV tier PG databases for a better testing pipeline on a shoestring budget.
I think it is amusing that half the comments section here is complaining about the lack of a free plan and the other half is complaining that the $5 plan is too cheap for them to keep it around.
Sounds exactly like real world politics. I thought people are waking up to if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. And free is perhaps the most expensive thing. Turns out no.
oh how i wish they were in azure. azure's postgresql flex offering is horrid. for some reason the HA standby instance can't be used as a read replica, it's filled with maintenance windows / downtime-ful upgrades / etc..
And that is why egress fees are anticompetitive. Azure forces their customers to demand that their service providers host in Azure.
In a less anti-competitive world you would be perfectly happy to use a database hosted in an Equinix facility or whatever next door. You could connect via a fractional 100Gbps link at a price multiple orders of magnitude below what Azure would actually charge for an equivalent amount of data transfer.
I guess this is one of the 2 or 3 things Sam talked about coming till end of year. I wonder what's the other 1 or 2.
I also imagine the previous Hobby plan running on Vitess is actually more expensive to run than even this $5 dollar tier, not viable unless it is on Postgres Metal with no HA.
I also wish there is a list of non hyperscaler providers with regions that are close to planetscale offering. Last time I checked Hetzner dont come anywhere close enough to be used for compute.
Hey ksec, you are right vitess is more expensive to run naturally. Do you host your apps in hertzer or is it a factor of cost? if you email me sam@planetscale.com i can give you free credits for either Vitess or Postgres.
Most people only need a single database node and will only ever need a single database node. There are many LOB apps in the world that you could reasonably turn off from 5 pm to 9 am every day. Five 9’s is an incredibly expensive and often unnecessary feature. I think this is a great offering.
Funnily enough I've been contemplating the idea of websites open during business hours and such for "local" as in kinda national scales. But it breaks down quickly once you factor in a potentially global audience.
So yeah, in the end available as much as possible (while sounding like "I needed it yesterday") might be the way to go even if you're not actually aiming for the extreme end of uptime.
Government websites like that aren't crazy uncommon because the letter of the law around accessibility can be interpreted to require a real person to be available any time the website is available for certain electronic forms: https://freakonomics.com/2012/08/this-website-only-open-duri...
(people in the comments did not get the correct reason why)
Most shared hosting services offer something similar for about the same price. On Dreamhost, the database servers are independent of the hosting servers. You can access the database servers from outside Dreamhost, if you configure MySQL to allow it.
Should I consider this if I’m using Render or fly.io for my services? Would latency be an issue? On my day job I cluster in the same AWS AZ and don’t realize what impact this would have for an app that may not be colocated.
Really big impact! I'm not sure how fly or render work but if your compute instances are in $city make sure your planetscale instance is too. You shouldn't be far off 'in region aws' latency at the point.
This is not true. All of our Vitess operations assume 3 node clusters. It's a lot of work to change (we have hundreds of thousands of nodes). For Postgres it was a lot simpler to do based on the architecture. There are equally good things coming for Vitess it's just for a slightly different audience.
"we've seen a number of Supabase -> PlanetScale migrations and it's been pretty simple with significant cost savings for the customer. The scale part of this is hard to answer because it really depends on the workload"
Looks like this is a perfect answer to my question, I mean I get it guys, I have created a comment here too on why their free tier thing deletion thing was wrong but I also get it, I personally knew a girl on discord who would create 20 free instances of some coding free thing just because she can and I honestly felt that moment that this is the reason why people like me who just use stuff casually don't have it for free.
Anyways, Oh god I was this close to writing it but then I saw the outlore's comments lore and how sam said "Either way I don't care what you remember or think", I am typing it in the moment but Sam you had no reason to type it smh
Most people are trying to help you, maybe the scars are still recent when the free tier was lost but there are better ways of explaining that the scar was both side, that you were hurt too and are willing to explain to them in a kind manner.
I was this close for advocating for PlanetScale, nope, Supabase/Neon, atleast they are open source but personally I just feel like hosting a hetzner instance and self hosting postgres but the only thing I am scared is that I am gonna mess things up and somehow would one day come to a broken system without backups. Any good utility or anything that makes backup as secure as one feels in the cloud regarding backups?
I don't buy that someone commenting "Remember when they shafted the free plan, laid off some good people and redesigned their website to look like some garish notepad? Pepperidge Farm remembers..." is trying to help me. It's naive to always assume good intentions, it allows people to be rude. Postgres is open source, we operate postgres really well at a price it's a super fair exchange of value imo.
I mean, planetscale first was a consumer / it looked as if they were B2C and I think they then pivoted into B2B, got postgres working, and now they are re-entering B2C-ish with the 5$ plan.
I want to like this so bad, but the free tier changes still haunt me. I ran a little hobby project for a while on it that helped junior developers find jobs. The work needed to switch from PlanetScale ultimately meant I just canned the project.
Fairly or not, when I see PlanetScale, that’s what I think of.
Seeing the CEO on here defending it as if they nailed the execution of it doesn’t help either.
I want to like it too.
Though, I wonder with any cloud provider of databases: why?
You’re basically giving your data to a 3rd-party to have access to and to be reliant on.
You have a backup of your source, but I bet many don’t have local non-cloud backups of their databases, maybe because it’s too much data to do easily, and everyone assumes the provider’s backups will suffice. This is a main reason I think that more recognized cloud brands like AWS and Azure are used.
We've paid for Scaleway's managed Postgres for almost 4 years at my previous startup. Small businesses don't always want to be managing a database.
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Why are you pretending like Planetscale is the only database provider? There are a large number of db/web providers (even free ones like GCP, Neon, Supabase etc) between using Planetscale and hosting your own server.
Remember when they shafted the free plan, laid off some good people and redesigned their website to look like some garish notepad? Pepperidge Farm remembers...
Yeah, and they became an actual profitable tech company which is extremely rare today.
Wanna say I heard someone defend Oracle with this line of logic, a while ago.
Um well, they shouldn't have done that. "If it means they go broke and need to shut down for me to keep having my free tier DB for 3 tables and 2 users, so be it, go broke"
Sounds horrible. Trying to think of another tech company that scaled down a free offering or laid off staff. Coming up empty.
I remember. It was a very painful moment for everyone involved. I still miss the people who aren't here anymore. I am not happy that it happened but I am also I am very glad to be at a profitable company. I get to work at a company that is growing sustainably surrounded by people I admire. I love our customers and I think in the long run people will root for a company that isn't just lighting money on fire at the alter of fake growth.
Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
> Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
it does feel to me that one way to demonstrate that is to not get pissy on hackernews. i know you’re in founder mode or whatever but this comment is the thing i’m now going to remember you for
Yeah, $5 databases is something that maybe I would actually use for some hobby projects, but that one sentence just killed any interest that I had in ever giving this company my money.
Same! Unreal that he keeps digging the whole deeper and deeper. Apparently, he doesn't know how to either keep his mouth shut or humble himself to admit a mistake and ask for forgiveness to those they burned by saying 'free forever'.
My apologies for sounding bitter.
You stated you don't care what I think. Just wanted to say though that i've admired you and your company for a long time. I participated in user interviews so I could score one of your famous hats. I submitted copious feedback. I was an evangelist for branching workflows and recommended several colleagues to your product. I watched all the talks, interviews and devrel videos.
I'm glad you are doing better now as a company, but as naive as it may be, I guess I would love to see an example of a company that consistently put people over profits, that is all
If a business does not run at a profit, it folds, and all the people there lose out.
Now, of course, the scale of the profit is worth discussing. The use of the profit is worth discussing. But in general terms some profit is necessary.
For example, I bootstraped a business from 0 to 50 people. We took no outside investment. We "paid" for the growth using profits. Our working capital, cash reserves, stock, equipment, vehicles etc, all come out of profits.
Yes, over the years, there have been things that didn't work out. People who ended up surplus to requirements. People not suited to the role they were in. Most left amicably. Some were pushed. None of that was easy but it was necessary because just keeping unproductive (or worse, divisive) people around is bad for everyone.
Running a business is hard. Firing people is hard. Comments like "people over profits" are flippant, but miss the underlying realities small businesses face all the time.
Yes, there are large tech businesses out there with bottomless pockets, who hire (and fire) by the thousands. But surely those bring hired in cohorts that big understand that a wind blows both ways.
It's not necessarily helpful though to apply your feelings about that to all the businesses that are not that.
I have immense respect for you building a profitable bootstrapped business. We raised venture to do this, I can't imagine bootstrapping. People are upset that I said I don't care what he thinks and maybe I was harsh but honestly people who have never tried doing this are always the ones to take shots, you basically can't care.
> I was harsh but honestly people who have never tried doing this are always the ones to take shots
People who haven't tried doing what, running a VC-backed SaaS, a model which by its own nature is destined to end up engaging in dumping practices to gain market share, after which enshittification ensues? With the alternative being going bust or being acquired and then quickly shut down? As we've seen hundreds of times now?
I mean, yeah. In the sense that people who haven't tried kicking their cat tend to be the ones taking shots at those who have.
Look, maybe you're a unicorn, in the sense that you're the 1%, the single person in your batch who ends up both profitable and won't follow down this path. But that's an extraordinary claim that would require overwhelming evidence. You spent lots of resources on Youtube and Twitter evangelism to cheap solo devs, targeting the exact content those consume - even compared to all of your competitors and other dev tools going at this market, investing in this strategy harder than almost anyone - which obviously results in an enormously lopsided % of free-tier uses (that's the whole point of the strategy). To then go "turns out we're not profitable this way, who woulda thought, guess we have to go paid-only!", this alone basically rules out the extraordinary claim. There's no chance you didn't do the back-of-the-envelope calculation about how big of a free tier you could realistically support.
I am wondering about one thing though. I would also wish to do things bootstrapped if possible if I ever do anything but I just have some questions that might sound stupid but alright
How do you actually sell stuff on the internet with a price?
I will admit, free stuff are easy to sell... because they are free. But once you remove the free stuff, it becomes a scar easy to tell in the future, is the answer always having the paid stuff or somehow limiting who gets the free stuff.
Like as I wrote in another comment, I like fly.io's free model of some credits per month with credit card, I mean, I don't like them taking credit card but if that's what prevents them from spam, I would still consider it decent enough
But I have read some places where saying things like asking for a credit card would drive away most users, and even asking for mail for sign up sometimes really
As such the world has transitioned into something which runs via the ad model as people in some HN thread long ago basically summed it upto, it was evolution of sorts
Yet, I am on HackerNews, I care about privacy. I would feel the largest double-speak if my software got ads, at that point, I would just release it for free but that would make me no money, maybe even cost me some money, making it unsustaianable
I am not sure about the reality of things but I am a pretty frugal guy, so naturally its really hard for me to expect people to buy stuff, let alone the stuff I make/hack.
I could try to open source any stuff I build, but at that point, what is the matter of that aside from getting some stars/internet points, don't get me wrong I love the philosophy of open source yet I feel like its very hard for me to actually generate money out of it
I love building simple things I guess, My projects ideally would be a simple golang binary maybe with postgres but sqlite's cool too, and I don't want to make it too hard to install unintentionally to trap people to my cloud or whatever really
I am asking because I feel like I can't go from 0 to 0 (employing even myself) and I feel like playing the growth game could be good but sooner or later, I would find myself in the same position as planetscale in that sense and I don't want it really, and I personally feel like my work can survive without VC funding as well. SO I genuinely don't know how I will get money from projects
My projects are niche as well, most of them aren't for profitability but rather to learn. I personally feel like I might be a good guy to do a job and to do these things as random projects to increase my portfolio and if luck strikes then that could be good I suppose.
I don't even expect someone to donate to my github if I ever create a project. Low confidence maybe, I am not sure. I have seen so many cool github projects that have gotten stars but not donations. I would love to donate to them, but personally I am frugal, I don't want it as a shield but I am opening up that shield and wanting to donate to open source. In fact if I make money through such any projects, I will try to actually donate to open source in the process as well.
So my question to you is: How? You guys make it feel so simple having people pay , There was the 4 hour work week which sort of suggested-ish building plugins for things etc. and I did calculation for it to actually make me "free" and I don't know but having 1000 people buy even 5$ personally a month would feel huge. but I am not sure as my frugality makes me believe everyone is like me and so why would they give me 5$ when they could do what I did or use some open source software with just some differences really.
You're assuming everyone values things the way you do. People do want to pay for products that solve their problems. Pick a problem you know well and solve it for someone else who has that problem. Discover if it has enough value to them to charge an appropriate fee. If that fee covers your cost then you are in business. Now figure out what it is going to take to find the next person. Find them, solve their problem. Widen the net to a larger group and you are moving. You have to start though, you need time researching, interviewing customers, messing around.
You sell it. And users are happy to pay because they're getting time and value in return. I also sell a product - not something database related but it doesn't matter. The users get value out of our product. To get the same thing elsewhere it would either cost them much more, be a lot less flexibly available, or be of lower quality.
If you were a gardener would you also find it hard to make people pay for you going to their house and taking care of their garden? They're paying for it because they feel it's worth it.
Of course, it depends on what you're selling, but I'm assuming you're not asking about selling gambling products or crack cocaine. As for those, the answer is "be a psychopath".
People over profit in this case would have been cowardice, not courage. Some had to lose their job for others to keep theirs and for the product to continue serving their customers.
Would you respect a leader who refuses to make hard calls and sinks everyone aboard the ship as a result?
Also people buy databases to do serious stuff. They pay you money to trust you with their data. Being a serious company that makes the hard calls to protect your product is exactly what a serious customer needs.
FWIW I was part of these layoffs and I completely supported them. No glory in putting your head in the sand when people count on you to do the right thing.
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> if you liked the company or product so much why would you take shots like that?
Key word here is "liked". Seems like OP liked the company when it had a free tier, and no longer does after it axed the tier. They don't owe your company anything, in the same way your company doesn't owe anything to the non-paying "customers" it stopped subsidising. No foul play by either party. I wouldn't take it too personally.
Jesus dude,just say it was a mistake to call it free forever. How can you be a founder or whatever, have a product and not expect people to judge the words your website had, or the words you say? You should know it comes with the territory.
Doesn't matter how hard you guys worked to be profitable, it's about building trust and relationship with your audience.
He's horribly blind to this. His arrogance and ego prevent him from doing the right thing.
Last sentence completely undercuts the other sentiments you shared in your comment… probably best to cut stuff like that out in the future IMHO, even if it’s how you feel.
> Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
Well I will remember this. It reflects poorly that your responses are childish when grappling with light criticism. Is this “Founder Mode”?
"Either way I don't care what you remember or think."
Imagine building a product for developers and then going on Hacker News telling people to fuck off.
Someone at my job mentioned using PlanetScale recently. I said "I'll check it out" and now I have: the CEO has terrible judgement and is a jerk. Permanent veto.
> people will root for a company that isn't just lighting money on fire at the alter of fake growth.
Pray tell, why did the company adopt the "fake growth" strategy in the first place?
> Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
It's evident you do. Feeling upset is fine, but writing that down as an attempt at a mic-drop statement just makes you appear incredibly thin-skinned.
Rug-pulls. Not even once.
I appreciate you’re responding personally and directly to people instead of running it through a corporate PR machine. That being said I’d also consider your tone, I have no doubt the topic pushes on a sore wound but the “I don’t care what you think” is probably not the attitude you want potential customers to stumble upon in the future.
I am not a customer and not in the market to be a customer anytime soon, I have no horse in this race, just an observation.
> Either way I don't care what you remember or think.
If you took your time to write it, you do care or if you genuinely don't, then people would now take it as a challenge to make you care...
This is just not good light. not all attention is created equal. This will hurt your company and your image.
Please, try to apologize to them if possible
I thought about it as an exercise as to what I thought your should last comment should be, it took some time but here it is
Hey, its great that you remember, it means that you cared about planetscale and somehow we were forced between false growth and real harsh truth and we wanted to present the truth, sorry if it had impacted any of your services. I know maybe I can't do much about how you can feel now about me or the company but I genuinely hope no matter what solution you might use now, you succeed in it with great success .If you feel like it, maybe give us another try but hey no pressure and as always, have a nice day :)
This took some time personally, especially after the part I genuinely hope no matter what solution personally but it didn't take more than 5 minutes to draft the whole response really.
Being kind helps. Atleast that's my philosphy or I would like to present it as such, I feel as if we are more common than different and basic human kindness resonates with that.
I hope you become the company seeking people's satisfaction first and absolute profits later but maybe that's an ideal. Just be honest with a bit of kindness and humility as there would be grace in it.
Honestly, my suggestion is to create something similar to fly.io really, have a 5$ free credit system but which requires credit card when signing up. It should prevent you from spams and if need be, try to limit it and try to do some excessive bot clearing
Maybe if you feel like you can have 5000$ for free without much compensation, then have limited (maybe verified?) people join in it for free with just credit card
Have some good restrictions on free license really, and although I haven't used fly.io as even the credit card got way too much of a requirement for me personally but,I would still look into what/how they are doing/implementing it
Taking some VPN as cautions plus taking note of suspicious activities from IP etc. comes to my mind as well if you go through this route. I think that you can genuinely create a good way to move some people as well or keep a free service while restricting it heavily really
Personally I wouldn't be able to afford the 5$ thing as well for just starting it out, I mean I haven't paid for any subscription ever on internet.
I am not sure what you are going to do or how you are going to pan out and take my suggestions lightly if need be, but please improve the tones and genuinely apologize to them if possible.
I don't know much about founder mode as other commentors point it out. I just think that your comment was a little bit rude and there were ways to make it better really
I honestly don't even know about your company before and the only thing I remember now about PlanetScale is the CEO telling HN readers to f off...
I'm surprised so many replies here are about removing a free tier 2 years ago. Things cost money, what did you expect? Whenever I get free products that cost money I expect it's either temporary, or I'm being the product myself.
didn't help that they called it "Free forever" before taking it away. Lesson learned
So as some of my own feelings/thoughts on this: I've also sat on the "receiving side" of a "free forever" campaign now 2 times in my career. The first time driven by the CEO and the second time driven by the marketing team (and supported by the CEO). In both cases, I knew the truth (sitting on the product management side) that there was no sustainable way to have a "free forever" campaign: that there was finite end in both cases on the 2-5 year horizon before we needed to change plans. I advocated against adding the "forever" verbiage knowing this. The first time, I didn't push strongly: it was my mistake.
The second time, I pushed strongly and made sure the entire executive team knew that we would be misleading our users. I pointed to the horizon and talked about the problems with "forever" language. I had to push very strongly back on the marketing team to change verbiage and then they silently made updates anyway to add "forever" verbiage. They were eventually fired for this.
But what I find concerning here isn't that the "free" tier went away (it almost always must) but that there's denial and push-back in this set of threads about the verbiage. You made a mistake. Own it and apologize for the verbiage you put out there. Don't deny that it was ever there or argue over pedantic details about where/how that verbiage was placed.
I only remember it was called "Hobby" Plan.
we never said that
https://web.archive.org/web/20240105211154/https://planetsca...
> Hobby
> Free forever for hobby use
wow we did you are right. I am corrected. That's not good.
Can you promise the $5 tier isn't going away?
for sure. it makes money for us and will lead to more usage. i am stoked we have this.
This kind of reply is not a good look for you or your company I think
as much as I question why someone would trust a free "forever" offer, I have a lot more questions about a company that is denying what's in the public record.
go ahead and ask the questions i will answer
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understandable, but again, "forever" as in heat death of the universe? Sadly there is no such thing as forever either.
To be fair the CEO is quite comfortable using the word 'forever'. It was used as the title of the announcement to withdraw the Hobby tier and also specifically used to justify it:
> We’ve chosen to build a company that can last forever. This is why I have made the decision to prioritize profitability for PlanetScale. https://planetscale.com/blog/planetscale-forever
Then call it something else
we did. we called it the Hobby plan. we never said forever.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240124013352/https://planetsca...
Says "free forever"
"Hobby Free forever for hobby use"
Wow. The guy is a jerk and a liar. The board at PlanetScale needs to get this guy off the internet. He's too much of an asshole to be seen in public.
I have no real horse in this race. I know how to manage my own databases, but I do have people asking me about PlanetScale and asking me to use it for certain projects, and I will absolutely never do so now.
note to self: add planetscale to banlist and not-recommended-list of techs
you answered this after someone just posted the wayback. what gives?
read the timestamps, i did not post it after the wayback.
Seen previous responses? Also, do you think he doesn't know it?
I'm pretty disinclined to ever use PlanetScale when the CEO is here either ignorant of what his company actually said, or actively gaslighting people.
I mean, can you picture some marketing copy somewhere on a website saying something you didn't remember?
It's not hard to imagine that not every word ever written about a product tier was remembered by the CEO.
What are you even saying?
This is the bloody pricing page. If I as the CEO of a SaaS startup don't even know what our pricing page says I should step down. That's our offer, that's the most important page we have. Come on now. Writing "free forever" isn't something some rogue marketing intern does, this is a core positioning decision and something you'd absolutely be part of, if not leading, as the founder.
correcting this. i've been proven wrong we did say forever.
"Free forever for hobby use"
What are you arguing about? People send you web archive links and you're still stubborn enough to say that it wasn't the case. Shame to even see you here, just shows what kind of company you are from the inside.
Indeed. I'm a user of Cloudflare free and Oracle(tm) Always Free(sic) services, but for hobby projects where I'm not under the illusion that they owe me anything.
I think the longevity of Gmail, Youtube etc being both (a) absolutely free and (b) personally critical to many people has rather warped expectations in this regard. Take the freebie, be grateful, but don't imagine that giving no money to a corporation is going to incur any obligation from them to you.
If somebody built a service to try out planetscale or the fact that planetscale was constantly hyped around / sponsored some big names atleast in the youtube scale, I am pretty sure that some people went there thinking about the free forever and everything...
I do think it was a little bad move because now you can't even test planetscale and the memories of its free stuff still might haunt some people
Were we supposed to just keep it up until we go out of business or something? Out of sheer duty. Like burn everything we built to the ground to keep the free tier going as long as possible? Endlessly indentured to provide a free service on the internet for people that will never pay us money so that the people that do pay us money can eventually have to move provider too because we are shutting down?
I didn't enjoy doing it. I felt bad but I don't regret it at all.
Fair take I guess, but my curiosity wants me to ask how big were the costs of the free tier that it was trying to make you shut down..
Do you feel as if people were abusing the free tier ? Was the only solution according to PlanetScale be to close the free tier entirely? How much were the people actually using the service (like out of 100 people who signed up, how many people were constantly utilizing it till its fullest) or ( maybe abusing it even)
If lets say that you could build your company once again or you could start planetscale from its beginnings, would you still take this decision before it was big, since I feel like as if the free tier was a key part in atleast giving PlanetScale some name/fame.
I can understand how you feel but I just feel like there were a lot of people who were advocates of your software, partially because of how people could test it out for free as well and those advocates were the one who were hurt the most. Personally, I wasn't involved but I would pretty bummed too if I advocate a service and it does something like this, although, I would still understand the situation.
Yes, that was the promise you made. You said 'besides our commercial offering we're going to support your personal projects you run out of passion, forever' and then you changed it to 'actually, we're going to delete your passion projects unless you pay us money'.
You should absolutely regret making that promise. As I understand it you're wrapping hardware at AWS and GCP, and likely have since the beginning, so you should absolutely have understood that this was a bad promise because it was dependent on recurring costs towards those suppliers that you did not have control over.
“you should absolutely have understood that this was a bad promise”
Absolutely wild to me that you talk to peers like children.
Nobody owes you anything. It’s all best effort.
It is both strange, fascinating but also wired and scary to watch all of these unfold in real life. Not just on the internet.
In pre 2010 era, we all knew Unlimited Bandwidth, Unlimited Storage was marketing and no one believes it. There is some sort of limit, and as long as we dont get caught it is fine. Free "forever" offering, Unlimited were all best effort. And It isn't just tech, but also politics. I mean they all say it but most wouldn't believe it.
And then we have a whole new generation of people who dont have this as norm anymore. They do believe everything should be free and could be free. Utopia is just around the corner. The cost of anything is so abstracted and muddled they have no idea why anything is priced as such.
Maybe the weird part was our generation getting obviously lied to by marketing and being like "this is fine"?
Maybe we shouldn't have been so accepting of long lists of asterisks/footnotes in ads or ToCs that invalidate much of the promotional material?
Yeah, you should be very adult and say that when corporations come to you and remind you that they think you owe them something.
>I felt bad but I don't regret it at all.
Sure, it sounds like a marketing mistake, and you're owning up to it not being sustainable.
But you're burning trust with people before they even have a relationship with your company if you pretend it never happened.
It's much better to say "Sorry non-customers, this wasn't sustainable. I hope this new approach will better serve us both in the hobby use case and still be sustainable!"
i have said almost exactly this so many times since it happened
Its hard shutting down services and nobody wants to do it. I've been there as a CTO and co-founder, but you made the right decision. Glad to see the new $5 plan because, imo, Planetscale is the best database to build with for majority of applications.
thank you
Just don't forget to add 5$ "forever"
Just apologize for misleading those who depended on your "free" promises. That's it, simple as that.
So it’s important to point out when a company still engages in such practices.
More surprising is what a jerk the CEO of PlanetScale is. He's on Twitter being nasty at everyone and everything. The guy is toxic as hell.
He posted this:
"I would like to thank the haters for helping me promote the new PlanetScale $5 plan all day. Thanks guys."
Scorching his reputation on Hacker News is a real 400 IQ movie for a cloud database company CEO.
Many of us grew up on stuff like SDF/Freeshell and IRC and ad-supported web hosts. "Free forever" actually meant "free forever" to us, until services that used the same language to make promises ripped us off and turned us more cynical.
So? Maybe don't offer a free tier if you can't sustain it? And many other providers (like Neon, Koyeb, Supabase etc) still offer a free tier. Personally I don't like this type of bait and switch. If you can't sustain something don't offer it in the first place. Same with open source projects going closed source for money after getting free work from open source programmers.
I notice that PlanetScale has a Developer Educator position available. Has anyone sent that to Aaron Francis yet? He might be interested.
Haha people have sent it to me! I'm currently trying to make it on my own in the wide world though.
I never disagreed with the decision to lay people off to become profitable. That's part of the implicit agreement when you take employment in the US. You can quit whenever you want and they can fire you whenever they want! I knew that going in!
I agreed with it, but of course it stung. That's only natural!
Sam and I are all good though! To his immense credit he reached out to me directly a little while back to mend any hurt feelings, of which I had a few. We're friends. He even came on my podcast and we talked for over an hour like old buds.
I have a lot of feelings and sometimes they get hurt. Sam has a fiduciary responsibility to the company. Today PlanetScale is a going concern and I'm happy and doing great! All is well.
The podcast is good btw, y'all should listen!
PlanetScale Postgres with CEO Sam Lambert https://youtu.be/IB3mzON8Iyw
I'm not sure returning to his previous job is his top priority right now.
Wow I didn't know he got laid off. I remember watching his videos a few years ago and absolutely loved his way of teaching. He's the reason I found out about PlanetScale to begin with.
Looking at their youtube channel, Aaron's videos had a total of ~1.4m views over 24 videos (an average of ~58k per video). Their recent videos don't even get past 1k views...
Imagine laying off one of the most genuine, friendly developer evangelists of all time.
It was sad to say goodbye to Aaron yes. I am glad he and I are on good terms again. I have immense professional respect for him.
Thank you Sam.
For others, I wrote a longer response above!
Very nice of you to characterize me as such, I truly appreciate it.
I wonder why other providers don't use metal ssd sync replication technique that planetscale uses? Most of them just default to EBS.
My interest in it peaked when I heard about NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe/TCP) and SPDK from Xata[1] and apparently with that performance is as good as planetscale metal, but planetscale found their methodology flawed[2] and they Xata never responded.
[1] https://xata.io/blog/reaction-to-the-planetscale-postgresql-...
[2] https://planetscale.com/benchmarks/xata
It's very hard to do. They all want to do it but can't so now it's their marketing team's jobs to lie to people about why they shouldn't want it.
@samlambert what exactly makes it hard? Isn't it as simple as setting synchronous_commit=remote_apply or does planetscale have a custom strategy or are there other operational issues?
Just asking since I find it both the planetscale's engineering and its impact on competitive landscape very interesting.
you have to make sure you will never terminate these nodes, that you have all the operations maturity to cycle them responsibly, and resize them. I am sure they will get there one day but most people are still figuring out how to run databases on k8s so it's a long road.
I'm honestly confused why local nvme disks haven't become the standard for cloud offerings a long time ago.
Aiven (not working for them, just a happy client) started offering local nvme disks for their postgres service in 2017. (https://aiven.io/blog/larger-and-faster-aiven-postgresql-pla...)
Back then I was sure it was only a matter of time for other hosted database providers to move on from EBS. But until Planetscale made a lot of noise about Metal no one seemed to bother.
I like PlanetScale, but they already have precedent very recently for having a free-tier and then cancelling it for a minimum of $40/month plan, which made many people switch. What's to stop them from doing the same here?
Be wary of building a cheap hobby project on it expecting pricing to stay consistent. If $40+ isn't feasible for you, you may be trying to switch off to a hosted PostgreSQL option, with all the pain MySQL->Postgres entails, soon.
(Planetscale employee) This is very different though: it's not a free tier, it's an actual single node DB as a paid product. It's definitely not a good fit for every usecase, but if you have a hobby project it's a great way to start with plenty of room to scale if/when you get actual usage
It's very similar in that it's not a huge source of revenue for Planetscale, so easy to pull the rug without disrupting revenue too much
Similarly to other replies (but my own opinion): it's not a huge source of revenue today, on a single customer basis, compared to our biggest customers, sure. But our goal is to provide potential customers that can't justify larger scale, 3-nodes databases, something they can build on and grow on our platform. We would never want to pull the rug on paying customers: we want to enable them :-) sure it's not a huge part of our revenue, but that's not the goal. We just want to provide a great product, in a way that's affordable to everyone. You of course don't have to take my word, but I think it makes business sense to do this and not pull the rug. Compare to a free tier where you bleed money in the hopes that customers will end up paying you. Hope isn't a good business strategy right? :-)
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this makes no sense to me
In what way? Companies drop/move on from small customers all the time as positions and analysis changes. $5 a month might make sense now, but with thin profits, a lower than predicted "upgrade rate" and maybe a higher than anticipated support cost etc and this becomes a less profitable option without price increases, which loses customers causing more increases because of none scalable costs etc.
Throw in a change of leadership or business focus and it's an easy short term boost to drop the many smaller customers and focus on the big fish who make the real money.
It's a common pattern, echoed over many industries, and while you might not see it being likely here right now, if the concept literally doesn't make sense to you, you need to look up some basic business ideas because it's a pretty valid concern.
It's easier to pull the rug out from under a group of customers who earn you 5% of your revenue than it is to do the same thing to a group of customers who make you 25% of your revenue.
This small $5 plan is obviously not going to make Planetscale very much revenue.
It's not made to make money, but to funnel paid customers onto their platform.
but its entry level pricing for customers that grow. it will be great for us. there is no point hurting our reputation and slowing growth.
You were buying flow for your sales funnel with a free plan now you want to attract users with a low tier plan. Your reputation was hurt with the first rug pull so why be surprised that users expect another rug pull from you in the future?
I think what Sam means is $5/mo is already profitable for them. Free plan wasn't.
If a free plan attracts users that can be upsold is that free plan not profitable _vs_ paying for advertising?
If such upselling is done via rug pull tactics it damages your reputation vs never having a free plan in the first place.
If a new bank offered you free or discounted banking would you move over your accounts and payments and credit cards? What if that bank has a reputation for upselling via rug pulling?
For users the cost of switching can mean that services that are free or cheap are not worth it if they are expecting a rug pull.
I agree, removing the free plan was a bad move. They should have at least grandfathered existing free tier users. I was just explaining their point of view.
When you don't need advertising anymore, the free plan starts becoming a net loss. If the $5 plan is profitable today, it will probably stay profitable forever as their costs will only go down, never up. There is little incentive to remove it (until Broadcom or Oracle acquires them).
You did a good job explaining their view. What I am doing is explaining the view of users and judging by your last post I have not yet done a good job so let me try again:
If elimination of a service plan is expected to push enough users to a _more_ profitable service plan why would a business not do it? Does it matter if the plan to be eliminated, generates _some_ profit?
Hope this helps!
Why would we? we make a (small) profit on these cheaper tiers. We are a sustainable and profitable company. Also the free tier wasnt cancelled very recently it was 1.5 years ago so you are reaching a bit here.
Why would a company squeeze customers after making them dependendent? Never heard of it.
Also what was capitalism again?
the reason we make sure all our products are gross margin positive is so this doesn't have to happen.
Your $5 plan may be gross margin positive but incentives are to push users into higher margin plans and from this pov this new plan looks much like your previous free plan which was rug pulled. Offering a free service to buy users then imposing migration costs on these users when you rug pull damaged your reputation. Next time perhaps grandfather existing users instead. If you want this new plan to be taken seriously update your terms to promise you will not rug pull again.
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This is a lazy response.
A bit of unsolicited advice:
This post is the first time I've heard of your company and your blog post interested me.
When proprietors go to the mat in the comment section, I immediately lose any interest in patronizing them.
I think it's great evening entertainment. Keep fanning the flames while I go make some popcorn!
He's responding in good faith to people expressing doubt that they will maintain this pricing tier, and is responding to rebuttals. Whether you agree with his point of view is different.
Sam is a great twitter follow
thank you
Off-topic, but you have a typo on your pricing page: "high-availablity"
Your loss, Planetscale is an amazing product.
I know comments section drama is fun, but I'm not seeing it here and it feels like you're trying to create it from scratch.
why is it going to the mat? i had to correct something that was untrue. 1.5 years is not very recently.
Case in point. Potential customers will see this dismissal as the equivalent of how long they expect this pricing to remain. You’re free to increase the price in a year and when customers are irked, “why isn’t it $5 anymore?” They’ll be met with “that’s not recent.” “That was so long ago”
If you want to rebuild reputation with hobby tier, you’ll probably want to put in a 3 year pricing guarantee, not 1 month like the notice last time.
1.5 years ago is recently IMO.
You currently make a small profit on cheaper tiers. Things change
Compute, storage, and network throughput are only getting cheaper over time. Assuming all other costs hold steady, it should only get more profitable.
What other free thing did people switch to? Nothing good seems free anymore.
free tiers are a subsidy paid by either VCs or paid users that in some cases can function as a marketing cost, if the free tier is time-limited and thus represents a finite cost to the business.
far better to just have transparent pricing that takes customer needs into account. bravo planetscale
Databricks Neon [1] has a free tier for their Postgres service. Neon's strength that allows them to offer a free tier lies in their serverless, cloud-native PostgreSQL architecture with a separation of storage and compute resources. This allows Neon to scale compute to zero automatically when the database is idle.
[1] https://neon.com
What allows them to offer a free tier is that they are ok with burning and losing money not because of how they built their service.
Even when a database scales to zero someone still has to pay.
They’re pretty infamous for having constant outages and downtime, wouldn’t recommend for something serious
I’m not saying that can’t or doesn’t happen but I’ve been using them for about 2 years now and never experienced it. To be fair, my traffic patterns could just not overlap with their outages but wanted to add a data point.
I am yet to experience an outage, and I have been using for several months.
>This allows Neon to scale compute to zero
It sure does scale to zero alright...
This is really good!
After they ditched there free tier, it became basically untenable to justify trying Planetscale for $30 (USD as well) on a POC or MVP product, and it also felt like you were paying a lot for unneeded hardware.
This is actually a really interesting offering to have available as someone who needs DEV tier PG databases for a better testing pipeline on a shoestring budget.
btw I've used neon for that and it worked well. Disclaimer: I have no relationship with them, I just have a shoestring budget.
I think it is amusing that half the comments section here is complaining about the lack of a free plan and the other half is complaining that the $5 plan is too cheap for them to keep it around.
Sounds exactly like real world politics. I thought people are waking up to if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. And free is perhaps the most expensive thing. Turns out no.
Stay away from them, You never know when they pull the rug
How hard could it be to migrate away from $5/m worth of a managed PG?
pull the rug on what? a profitable product?
oh how i wish they were in azure. azure's postgresql flex offering is horrid. for some reason the HA standby instance can't be used as a read replica, it's filled with maintenance windows / downtime-ful upgrades / etc..
And that is why egress fees are anticompetitive. Azure forces their customers to demand that their service providers host in Azure.
In a less anti-competitive world you would be perfectly happy to use a database hosted in an Equinix facility or whatever next door. You could connect via a fractional 100Gbps link at a price multiple orders of magnitude below what Azure would actually charge for an equivalent amount of data transfer.
I guess this is one of the 2 or 3 things Sam talked about coming till end of year. I wonder what's the other 1 or 2.
I also imagine the previous Hobby plan running on Vitess is actually more expensive to run than even this $5 dollar tier, not viable unless it is on Postgres Metal with no HA.
I also wish there is a list of non hyperscaler providers with regions that are close to planetscale offering. Last time I checked Hetzner dont come anywhere close enough to be used for compute.
Hey ksec, you are right vitess is more expensive to run naturally. Do you host your apps in hertzer or is it a factor of cost? if you email me sam@planetscale.com i can give you free credits for either Vitess or Postgres.
Hi Sam. Thank You for the kind offers. But I will happily pay for the great product and services to support you guys. Just keep up the great work.
How much vCPU, memory, and storage will this have?
Going from 3 node highly available multi region DB clusters at 30$ per month to 5$ a month for a single DB node
Most people only need a single database node and will only ever need a single database node. There are many LOB apps in the world that you could reasonably turn off from 5 pm to 9 am every day. Five 9’s is an incredibly expensive and often unnecessary feature. I think this is a great offering.
Funnily enough I've been contemplating the idea of websites open during business hours and such for "local" as in kinda national scales. But it breaks down quickly once you factor in a potentially global audience.
So yeah, in the end available as much as possible (while sounding like "I needed it yesterday") might be the way to go even if you're not actually aiming for the extreme end of uptime.
Government websites like that aren't crazy uncommon because the letter of the law around accessibility can be interpreted to require a real person to be available any time the website is available for certain electronic forms: https://freakonomics.com/2012/08/this-website-only-open-duri...
(people in the comments did not get the correct reason why)
B&h photo video closes their order system on Jewish holidays in the NYC time zone. I often find myself saving items to order the next day on there.
Most shared hosting services offer something similar for about the same price. On Dreamhost, the database servers are independent of the hosting servers. You can access the database servers from outside Dreamhost, if you configure MySQL to allow it.
Should I consider this if I’m using Render or fly.io for my services? Would latency be an issue? On my day job I cluster in the same AWS AZ and don’t realize what impact this would have for an app that may not be colocated.
Really big impact! I'm not sure how fly or render work but if your compute instances are in $city make sure your planetscale instance is too. You shouldn't be far off 'in region aws' latency at the point.
Love the design! It feels like browsing on MD files.
Sadly they don't mention that this will come to MySQL/vitess as well, it makes it look like Postgres is thing they care about now as a company.
This is not true. All of our Vitess operations assume 3 node clusters. It's a lot of work to change (we have hundreds of thousands of nodes). For Postgres it was a lot simpler to do based on the architecture. There are equally good things coming for Vitess it's just for a slightly different audience.
What does the durability story look like for this single node offering ?.
data is still replicated safely from the single node which is also backed by EBS.
For context: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45339279) (which basically asked if using supabase's free tier and then migrating to planetscale when needing the scale)
and Sam's response
"we've seen a number of Supabase -> PlanetScale migrations and it's been pretty simple with significant cost savings for the customer. The scale part of this is hard to answer because it really depends on the workload"
Looks like this is a perfect answer to my question, I mean I get it guys, I have created a comment here too on why their free tier thing deletion thing was wrong but I also get it, I personally knew a girl on discord who would create 20 free instances of some coding free thing just because she can and I honestly felt that moment that this is the reason why people like me who just use stuff casually don't have it for free.
Anyways, Oh god I was this close to writing it but then I saw the outlore's comments lore and how sam said "Either way I don't care what you remember or think", I am typing it in the moment but Sam you had no reason to type it smh
Most people are trying to help you, maybe the scars are still recent when the free tier was lost but there are better ways of explaining that the scar was both side, that you were hurt too and are willing to explain to them in a kind manner.
I was this close for advocating for PlanetScale, nope, Supabase/Neon, atleast they are open source but personally I just feel like hosting a hetzner instance and self hosting postgres but the only thing I am scared is that I am gonna mess things up and somehow would one day come to a broken system without backups. Any good utility or anything that makes backup as secure as one feels in the cloud regarding backups?
I don't buy that someone commenting "Remember when they shafted the free plan, laid off some good people and redesigned their website to look like some garish notepad? Pepperidge Farm remembers..." is trying to help me. It's naive to always assume good intentions, it allows people to be rude. Postgres is open source, we operate postgres really well at a price it's a super fair exchange of value imo.
Is it possible to install Timescale on those?
we are working on the open source licensed version.
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Will it be planet scale still?
i onboarded on planetscale when it was in free tier. Then they charged 40$.
Last year they increase the pricing again.
they attract users and increase the pricing. that is the game here.
well...Many database vendors offers free databases for dev purpose for years, i mean it's not a news.
I mean, planetscale first was a consumer / it looked as if they were B2C and I think they then pivoted into B2B, got postgres working, and now they are re-entering B2C-ish with the 5$ plan.